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Butane Huffing
Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma Date: April 11, 1992 Story On April 11, 1992 in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, fifteen-year-old Brad Kaye had planned to spend the afternoon with his usual group of close friends who lived in the neighborhood. He and his father, Tom, got along, but Tom had no idea of the tragic risks Brad was taking. "Brad was an all American boy, adventuresome, intelligent, inquisitive, and sometimes mischievous. He'd walk into the room, and in a matter of minutes, he'd have the whole place in uproar," remembers Tom. Brad rode his bike up the street to his friend Rodney Price's house. They had known each other since they were five. According to Rodney, Brad was his best friend, like a little brother to him. "When we were bored, he would usually find something to do, tell a joke or something. He was hilarious. He'd make everybody laugh," said Rodney. Another close friend, Aaron Albrecht, was also at Rodney's that day. "We were talking. Someone had mentioned butane, and so we decided to go to the store. Me, Brad, and another friend," said Aaron. "Huffing is kind of like a fad. Everybody at school was doing it. Brad loved it because it made him feel like he was invisible. I felt the same thing. I liked it, too," remembers Rodney. They were driving in the car. Aaron huffed it once in a while, never thinking it would hurt him, but Brad did about a whole can and was being normal. When they got back to Rodney's house, Brad was walking in front of Aaron and suddenly collapsed. Aaron told him to get up, but he wouldn't move, and all of Rodney's friends came running out in horror and asked his mom to call 911. Rhonda Brown, a registered nurse, was at home two doors up the street. "I heard kids screaming, and I thought, 'Great! Somebody's fighting!' Then I looked up over the fence, and I could see Brad laying on the ground," said Brown. Brad started making this sound where you could tell that no air was moving in his lungs and Brown did CPR on him. "A car pulled up at that point and a man came out and said, 'I know CPR'. I was screaming at him, 'Come on, come on!' At that point, I was all nurse," said Rhonda. One of the kids ran to get Tom. "I didn't know whether he had an accident. I didn't understand why he was on the ground and not breathing. I couldn't comprehend what was going on," said Tom. Brad only responded to Brown one time, looked at her, and took a full breath. Rescue units with the Broken Arrow Fire Department arrived within five minutes, including EMT Paul Thompson. "When I realized that Brad was in cardiac arrest, I put my pads on his chest and hooked up my defibrillator," said Paul. Rodney walked away and was crying so hard. They shocked him, but it had no affect on him. "He was fifteen. He had a good strong heart and so I kept thinking, 'Get this kid to the hospital, get him on a vent, and he will be fine,'" said Rhonda. Brad was taken to St. Francis Hospital where pediatric intensive care specialist Dr. Michael Stuttgart took over his care. "He was very unresponsive, unfortunately, because by filling his lungs with butane, he no longer had oxygen, and the oxygen levels in his blood dropped rapidly. You could only look at his face and see a beautiful young man there, who did something intentionally, who was now laying there helpless. Everybody was just very depressed, knowing that this could have been prevented," said Dr. Stuttgart. All Tom and his wife, Jan, could do was wait for word on Brad's condition. One of the police officers came up to me and said, 'Your son was huffing butane,' and I said, 'What's that?' and he said, 'Well, that's where you inhale it from a can.' And I thought, 'Oh, God!' I couldn't believe that Brad would do something like this," said Tom. "You just keep hoping that this isn't really happening. It didn't seem real. I hoped that this was happening to someone else," said Jan. Dr. Stuttgart explained to them that Brad's brain was seriously injured and that he was unlikely to survive. "At that point, our hearts just absolutely sunk," said Tom. "There was just no change in Brad at all, from the first time I saw him to the last time I saw him. You know miracles happen every day and I thought, 'Why can't one happen for us?'" added Jan. At 5:30am on April 12, the nurse came in and told Tom and Jan that Brad was failing and that they needed to be with him. "The nurse said, 'If you want to say something to your son, now's the time.' So we went in there and spent the last moments with him, holding his hand as he slipped away. There was nothing more we could do," said Tom. At 6:01am, less than 11 hours after he collapsed from inhaling the butane, Brad was pronounced dead. "The lesson I would love to have people learn is that these types of drugs are very dangerous. You are essentially playing Russian Roulette. The tragedy here is one of ignorance. There are probably thousands of children out there who are inhaling these various chemicals. And probably, as we speak, one of them is dying," said Dr. Stuttgart. "I still have a picture of him on my wall just to remind me. I don't want to forget him. If Brad never died, I'd probably still be huffing right now. But that, right there, is something that can kill you. Even though I'm not dead, it seems that some part of me is dead because he died. It seems that part of me is missing," said Rodney. "I always knew teenagers weren't invinsible, even though they think they are. It's sad that it took him for everybody to learn a lesson. I miss him, and if I could do anything to bring him back, I would!" said Brown sadly. "It might be a very long time for Jan and I to recover, and we probably never will. We'll always hold a very special part of Brad in our hearts. You see a boy Brad's age and you wonder what he would've grown up to be. He had a lot of opportunities, and he won't be able to fulfill them at this point, because he made a very awful mistake," concluded Tom. Category:1992 Category:Oklahoma Category:Poisonings Category:Cardiac Arrest Category:Death